Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.

Aldous Huxley
Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.

Aldous Huxley
A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.

Aldous Huxley
Life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything

Aldous Huxley
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.

Aldous Huxley
Beauty for some provides escape,
Who gain a happiness in eyeing
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Aldous Huxley
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

Aldous Huxley
[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

Aldous Huxley
To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.

Aldous Huxley
Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

Aldous Huxley
Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.

Aldous Huxley
Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.

Aldous Huxley
What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

Aldous Huxley
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'

Aldous Huxley
Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence,... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

Aldous Huxley
Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?

Aldous Huxley
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Aldous Huxley
Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Aldous Huxley
Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces bestowed on us, we shall actually make it impossible for further graces to be given.

Aldous Huxley
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Aldous Huxley
All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

Aldous Huxley
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley
The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.

Aldous Huxley
We were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

Aldous Huxley
In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.

Aldous Huxley